Bonnie Cashin - The New York Community Trust

Bonnie Cashin
1908 - 2000
Memorialized by the BONNIE CASHIN FUND in
The New York Community Trust
T
raditional Japanese kimonos. Military
uniforms. A chorus line. A spor ty
convertible. These were the makings
of mid-20th century American style, as
defined by the singular Bonnie Cashin.
Cashin never formally trained as a fashion
designer—in fact, she disdained the very term—but
from her quiet start as a ballet-costume designer
in the 1930s, Cashin would become one of the
premier names in American sportwear. As fashion
historians point out, during an era when the chicest
clothing fashion came to the United States from
Paris and Milan, Bonnie Cashin was among the
first clothing designers to export American style
and ingenuity.
BEGINNER’S LUCK
One might say that Bonnie Cashin was born to
design. Her father, Carl, was a photographer and
inventor; her mother Eunice a dressmaker. Born in
Fresno, California in 1908, as a young child Bonnie
played with her mother’s fabric scraps and drafted
clothing illustrations. Eunice fiercely encouraged
her daughter’s creativity, and she would prove to
be a lifelong mentor and design partner.
Away from the sewing table, Bonnie loved
to dance, and in high school she went to try out
for the chorus line of a local vaudeville company,
Fanchon and Marco. Losing her nerve before the
audition, Bonnie instead ended up showing her
drawings to the company director, and was hired
on the spot as a costume designer. It was a turning
point in her career. After two years working with
Fanchon and Marco and taking drawing classes at
the Chouinard School of Art, Bonnie followed the
company director to New York City and the Roxy
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Sketches of costume designs for New York’s Roxyettes; and a
young Bonnie in one of her early designs.
Theater in 1933. As the costume designer for the
Roxyettes, the theater’s famous showgirls, Bonnie
designed three costume changes a week for each
of the 24 dancers. In what little spare time she had,
she continued to study drawing at the Art Students’
League in midtown.
Despite those occasional classes, Bonnie
considered her time at the Roxy her only “formal
schooling in design.” This was where she mastered
the art of designing clothing that flattered figures in
motion, which would define her style for decades
to come. And Bonnie’s designs for the Roxyettes
did make quite a splash. An article published in
Variety at the time recognized her as “the youngest
designer to hit Broadway.” Her work was spotted
by Harper’s Bazaar editor Carmel Snow, who
introduced her to the coat and suit manufacturer
Adler & Adler. Moving off the stage and onto the
street, Bonnie Cashin landed a top design job.
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MAKING HER MARK
Cashin would stay with Adler & Adler for five years,
from 1937 to 1942. In 1941, with World War II
well underway, she was appointed, with fellow
designers Vera Maxwell and Claire McCardell, to
a committee charged with designing uniforms
for women serving in the armed forces. Her
experience working with the military would prove
to be another long-term influence on her work.
She developed an appreciation for clothing that
was comfortable, protective, and—like her dance
costumes—allowed freedom of movement. Uniform
design meant exposure to new materials, too: The
tough and practical leather, canvas, toggles, and
industrial-strength zippers Cashin used in uniforms
would reappear in her sportswear designs for years
to come.
In 1942, at the request of producer William
Perlberg, Cashin left Adler & Adler to move back
to Hollywood and design costumes for Twentieth
Century Fox. In seven years with the studio she
created costumes for 60 films, including Laura, A
Tree Grows in Brooklyn, and Anna and the King of
Siam. Cashin relished her time in Hollywood, later
explaining: “I wasn’t designing for fashion, but for
characteristics, which is the way I like to design
clothes for daily wear.” It was, however, when
Cashin returned to New York City and Adler & Adler
in 1949 that her career really took off. In 1950,
Cashin’s Adler & Adler collection won her the first
of four Coty Awards and a Neiman Marcus Award.
Two years later, she struck out on her own,
opening Bonnie Cashin Designs. Over the course
of the next two decades, she collaborated with
top labels, including Ballantyne, Philip Sills,
Modelia, Bergdorf Goodman, Liberty of London,
and Revillon. In 1964 Cashin was hired by Coach,
where she revolutionized their handbags with her
characteristically practical design elements—the
brass hardware, detachable straps, and bright
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A Coach
advertisment
from 1970.
colors—which remain emblematic of Coach’s
signature style today. By the 1970s, Bonnie Cashin
boutiques were fixtures in chic Paris and London
department stores and she had been named to
the Coty Fashion Critics Hall of Fame.
GLOBAL INFLUENCES, GLOBAL IMPACT
In copy she wrote for a Macy’s ad in 1950, Cashin
described her ideal customer: “I live in New York or
California or Paris. My suitcase is always packed,
and the world is just around the corner.” To some
extent, she was describing herself. Cashin was
a “nomad by nature,” and often on the move.
Wherever she went she collected local artifacts,
folk art, and items of clothing, often replacing
the wardrobe she packed with one she acquired
overseas. Cashin observed the locals with a keen
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eye, and the clothing she designed at home clearly
reflected her adventures abroad. ‘’I remember the
way a fisherman wore his shirt in Portofino, the
odd chic of the beige and white starched habit of
a little nun in Spain, the straw hat of a man riding
a donkey in Rhodes, a man’s wedding scarf in
India, the elegant drape of a panung in Bangkok,”
she scribbled on a colorful quote-covered wall in
her apartment.
In fact, Cashin’s signature look—the layered,
loose-fitting, elegant clothing for which she became
most widely known—was inspired by her travels
to Japan, where she learned that cool weather
was referred to as a “nine-layer day.” Layered
clothing—always lightweight and easy-to-pack
for that independent woman on the go—was just
one of Cashin’s dozens of design innovations. As
Bill Blass wrote in Cashin’s Women’s Wear Daily
obituary in 2000, she was “conspicuously first in
a lot of sportswear and outerwear design.” She
introduced capes and ponchos, replaced buttons
with grommets, used industrial zippers, and
integrated countless pockets and pouches into her
belt, jacket, and handbag designs. She was the first
to use canvas for raincoats and dress women in
jumpsuits. Even the equestrian-style hardware so
closely associated with Gucci designs showed up
on Cashin’s Coach handbags first.
Cashin’s designs were clever, original,
and most of all, practical. An often-cited Cashin
anecdote tells how she designed a poncho after
cutting a hole in a blanket during a windy ride in
her convertible; that same car’s rooftop hardware
inspired the brass toggles she adopted for her
handbags. In a 2000 résumé of Cashin’s life and
career in the New York Times Magazine, Amy
Spindler aptly described Cashin as “inspired by
the promise of modern design—that newer, more
functional, more technological ideas could make
life better.” This explains in part why Cashin didn’t
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Bonnie in her studio.
consider herself a fashion designer, but a peer
of other pure modernists like her friends Ray
and Charles Eames, Isamu Noguchi, and George
Nelson.
ENCORE PERFORMANCE
If Bonnie Cashin’s name isn’t always recognizable
today, it’s because her approach to business was
as original as her clothing. Unlike many of her
contemporaries, Cashin never licensed her name
or hired design assistants. Anything that said
“Bonnie Cashin” was designed by Bonnie Cashin,
and she hand-picked manufacturing partners who
granted her complete creative control. Cashin
worked at more than arm’s-length distance from
the Seventh Avenue heart of the fashion industry,
in what she called her “secret laboratories,” and
always considered herself an outsider in the
fashion world.
Nonetheless, in the years leading up to her
death in 2000, Cashin’s contributions to fashion
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were celebrated many times over by the very
establishment from which she felt so alienated. Her
work was featured in exhibitions at the Metropolitan
Museum of Art and the Brooklyn Museum of Art.
The Fashion Institute of Technology mounted a
solo retrospective that included a re-creation of her
UN Plaza apartment, and a Coach reissue of her
handbags was warmly received by fashion editors
and consumers alike.
AN ENDURING LEGACY
Bonnie Cashin retired from design in 1985 and
devoted herself to painting and philanthropy.
She had always been known among friends
and colleagues for her generosity, and had long
demonstrated her commitment to nurturing a new
generation of innovative thinkers. To that end, she
established a scholarship fund in her mother’s
memory at the Fashion Institute of Technology,
and an arts-focused lecture series in her uncle’s
name at California Institute of Technology. In 1981,
she started the Innovative Design Fund, a New
York City nonprofit created to support educational
and cultural institutions that promote creative
thinking in design arts and encourage dialogue
with creative minds in diverse disciplines. In 1988,
the Innovative Design Fund was moved to The New
York Community Trust.
When she died in 2000, she left her estate
to charity, and her executors created the Bonnie
Cashin Fund in The New York Community Trust,
“to be used for grants for educational, cultural,
charitable, or scientific purposes, including libraries,
museums, and schools, or for the rehabilitation and
training of the poor and homeless, or for advanced
scientific research.”
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The New York Community Trust
is a community foundation, helping New
Yorkers achieve their charitable goals
and making grants that respond
to the needs of our City.
909 Third Avenue
New York, NY 10022
T: 212-686-0010
F: 212-532-8528
www.nycommunitytrust.org
December 2009